Remembering the Odyssey in the 21st Century: Oral Narratives by Common Readers
Résumé
Research on classical reception has centered on texts characterized by high levels of authorial control; more recently, there has also been interest in the appropriation of themes and figures from classical antiquity in consumer-oriented popular culture. 1 This article continues an alternative line of inquiry that has considered the afterlife of Greco-Roman texts and myths among the less educated strata. Examples of such curiously distorted reception are familiar to scholars of late antiquity and premodern Europe: verses from the Homeric poems were used in magical incantations (Collins); the story of Oedipus was told about Pope Gregory the Great and Andrew of Crete (Propp, "Oedipus"), and so on. 2 If we approach the echoes of Homer in today's globalized culture as oral narratives, we discover a poetics of retelling that is no less informative than its medieval analogues.
This article relies on a technique of data collection developed within sociolinguistics, particularly in William Labov's work on danger-of-death stories. Its objectives, however, are neither sociolinguistic nor strictly literary-historical. Instead, we pose a theoretical question: how do complex narratives fare in a state of partial oblivion? 3 More specifically: what can we learn about the plots of such narratives from texts that record efforts to recollect them?
The transformation of plots in history seems to obey its own, as yet obscure logic. An important step toward elucidating this logic is taken in Alexander Veselovsky's Poetics of the Plots, a work that served as an inspiration for Vladimir Propp's The Morphology of the Folktale. Veselovsky distinguishes between motifs and plots, construing the former as elemental units of narrative that respond to history, and the latter, as nontrivial concatenations